Most Advanced Technical and Hardware Facts of the Transformers Trilogy

Transformers has made a awesome revolution in 3D animations. Being a really big Transformers fan, and being part of the coolpctips crew, I just couldn’t resist posting some really amazing facts about the Transformers movies. I learn a bit of 3-D animation myself at school, so I completely understand the technical terms used to describe the movie statistics. So there’s gonna be a lot of Math, and technical terms but I won’t give you a chance to worry about it. I’m gonna give you brief description about every term so stay put. And why are we discussing about movies on a website that deals with tech and computers? We’ll that’s because this is technology and this definitely computers, because everything that we’re gonna talk about is Computer Generated.

Which software was used for transformers movies?

Well that’s a really silly question, because a mufti-million dollar franchise wouldn’t use software’s that a couple of teenage kids use by just simply downloading it off the internet. They are professional tools and software’s that would cost a million itself. So who do you call in to create real robots that look more than just perfect on IMAX screens? The answer is pretty simple. ILM( Industrial Light and Magic). ILM uses all kinds of software’s, mostly custom versions of Autodesk Maya, 3Ds Max that are intelligently scripted by tonnes of programmers, I heard they use python for coding the physics of the moving particles. Apart from that they also use Z-brush, Photoshop for fixing minor details. 4-D cinemas and whole lots of other software’s that I never even heard of.

The above picture shows you how ILM animators actually bring the robots to life. This picture where bone-crusher charges Optimus is artificially imported into a 3-D environment with a co-ordinate system where the models are added and the camera footage is combined with the 3-D animation and later detailed to make them look real. As you can see, the sparks coming off bone-crushers feet aren’t real, these things are added and fixed during match-moving phase.

Robot Statistics :

60217 pieces ( Pieces of robots )

12.5 million polygons (Polygons are used in computer graphics to compose images that are 3-D in appearance. )

144,341 rigging nodes ( Skeletal structures used in animation )

34,215 texture maps ( 3-D environments that are created to match the real environments )

over 7 million kilometers if each piece was line up end to end.

5500 processes and 220 Tera Bytes of storage.

And the above statistics my friends, might be too much to think of. These are the statistics of the First movie: Transformers alone. If you have any idea what I’m saying you can understand how massive the production scale is.

Transformers : Robots

1) 14 robots in the first movie, 46 robots in the second and about 85 in the 3rd movie ( managed by ILM only).

2) All robot parts laid out end to end would stretch from one side of California to the other, about 180 miles

3) If all the texture maps on the show were printed on 1 square yard sheets, they would cover 13 football fields.

Transformers : Disk Storage and processing space

1 ) Transformers 1 took 20 Terabytes of disk space and Transformers 2 took 145 Terabytes. Seven times bigger!
2 ) 145 terabytes would fill 35,000 DVDs. Which, when Stacked one on top of the other without storage cases, they would be 145 feet tall.

Rendering times

1) If you rendered the entire movie on a PC (say the PC which you are reading this post from now) , it would take 16,000 years, yes ! you heard it right. To complete the render process you’d have to start the render process for 16,000 years ago (non-stop) to complete it today. A simple equation to support what I mean.

(24 Frames Per Second) *(60 Seconds Per Minute)*(38 Hours to Render Each Frame)=(Several Years to Render each Scene)

2) A single imax shot in the movie (df250) would have taken almost 3 years to render on a top of the line home PC running nonstop.

Which Michael Bay managed to render in 2 days with few hundreds of super computers. What a man!

Imax Render times and facts

1) Optimus Prime will be life size on IMAX screens in many forest fight shots.
2) IMAX frames take about 6 times longer than anamorphic (ordinary frames) to render.
3) IMAX frame render times As high as 72 hours per frame!

Devastator

Devastator is as tall as a 10 story building.

Laid out end to end, Devastator’s parts would be almost 14 miles long.

Number of geom pieces: 52632.

The total number of polygons: 11,716,127.

The total length of all pieces: 73090 feet,that’s 13.84 miles.

Devastator’s parts stacked end to end would be as tall as 58 empire state buildings.

Devastator’s hand is traveling at 390 miles per hour when he punches the pyramid.

The pyramid destruction simulation was 8 times bigger than the old rigid simulation all-time record holder at ILM.

Megan Fox’s CGI Hotness

It’s difficult to believe that there can be one human on the earth so perfectly molded to push every guys buttons and dreams, everybody knows she’s hot with all the make up and all. But after the first movie, the fans were asking for more from Megan. So Michael Bay decided to process Megan in CGI and animatronics. I feel sorry for all the Megan Fox fans, she really is just another CGI chic, woman who is as manufactured as Bumblebee. I head they spent thousands of dollars on this. Here’s a video to support my claim.

And for all those who read this post. Thanks a lot. I hope this article had a lot to give you. Comments are appreciated. Your far too kind. Share this transformers technology article with your friends if you liked it.

About The Author

Pranay is studying computers in Information Technology Engineering at Geethanjali College Of Engineering And Technology.He is a full time professional Gamer besides studies and an active online gamer since 1999.

i am a first year student of btech as ece as my branch and i am very much interested in these graphic works,i want to have this as my career,so could you help me by letting me know what should i learn for this . thank you

You’ll need to first decide what you want to be, there are multiple jobs in this arena. For example, there’s 3D modelers, Animators, Designers, Concept Artists, Effects Animator and much more. Read up a bit here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_effects